“No one steals the chairs?” I asked.
She pointed to inconspicuous bolts and chains. “Not yet.”
She held out her hand. “Kelly Crisco.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dixie and hastily introduced me as an old friend and Market first-timer.
“And this is Heather McKenzie from Furniture/Today.”
“Oh, yes,” said Dixie. “You were with Jay Patterson.”
She leaned forward to look at Heather’s badge more closely. “Are you new to the paper?”
“Actually, I’m a freelancer from the Massachusetts office,” she said, which explained the accent. “They asked me to do some profiles on some of the legends of the Market, and Savannah’s my first choice. They say she originated so many design concepts that have become standard practice. Do you know her?”
“I thought I did, but tonight’s the first time I’ve seen her in ages and I barely recognized her.” Dixie glanced at her watch. “Sorry to break this up, but I’ve got a rough day to-morrow. Pell said he’d be glad to put you up as long as you need, Deborah. Where’re you parked?”
“That’s going to be a bit of a problem,” I said and explained about the mix-up with the totes. “I’ve got Savannah’s fried chicken and she has my purse, car keys, checkbook, cell phone—hey! Wait a minute. You don’t suppose—?”
Dixie grinned. “Worth a try. Wasn’t there a guy last year who had his car stolen and he called up his car phone—”
“Yeah,” said Heather. “And he talked the thief into bringing it back for what the insurance company would have paid him.”
We said goodnight to Ms. Crisco and walked down to Dixie’s phone in the Southern Retail Furnishings Alliance office where I dialed my cell phone.
It took two tries and eight rings before a husky Lauren Bacall voice said, “Hello?”
6
« ^ » “The general good sense of the people is superior to their philosophy, even though the latter be clothed in the dignified solemnity of the Puritan, or wear the soft graces of the purely religious enthusiast.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
Trying to sound like a friendly non-threatening airhead with no ulterior reasons for calling except to get my own bag back, I said, “Ma’am? This is Deborah Knott. We had supper together at the food court this evening?”
Silence.
“Ma’am?” (No way was I going to risk offending her with any of the names she’d used in my hearing.) “I don’t know how I made such a silly mistake, but you remember those Fitch and Patterson tote bags they gave us? Well, we seem to have gotten them mixed up.”
More silence, but at least she hadn’t cut me off.
“So what I was wondering was if I could come and bring you yours and get mine because I left my car keys in it?”
“No, no, no!” Her husky voice held the same vehement withdrawal as when I’d suggested earlier that she might let me crash on her sofa.
Hastily, I amended, “Or maybe we could meet somewhere? I’m at Dixie Babcock’s office on the sixth floor of the Global Home Furnishings Market and she could bring me anywhere you say.”
I raised my eyebrows inquiringly at Dixie and she nodded.
“Please? I really do need my things tonight and I’m sure you want yours?”
“Go to the open door,” she said at last
I looked around wildly. The Southern Retail Furnishings Alliance suite consisted of Dixie’s office and two smaller ones, a generous reception area and an overcrowded work/storage area that housed the basic machines without which no modern office can function: fax, communal printer, copier, microwave and coffee maker. From where I stood, every door in sight was already wide open.
“Which open door?” I asked.
There was a barking sound at her end of the connection. It took me a moment to recognize that the sound was laughter.
“On North Centennial,” she said. “I will leave your bag with Yolanda and you may do the same with mine.”
“Yolanda who? And when will you be there?”
Too late. The connection was broken. I tried to call her back, but after three rings, an operator came on the line to inform me that the person I was calling was unavailable at that time.
Savannah must have found the Off switch.
“Not to worry,” Dixie told me. “North Centennial? She probably means the Open Door Ministry. It’s a shelter for the homeless and Yolanda Jackson runs the soup kitchen for the hungry. The Father’s Table. I’ve volunteered there a few times. It’s not far.”
“May I come with you?” asked Heather McKenzie.
“Only if you promise not to spook her before I get my purse back,” I said.
Dixie picked up her own purse and keys. As she began switching off lights, the phone rang.
“That’s either Pell or the baby-sitter wondering where we are,” she said and picked up the receiver. “Dixie Babcock… Oh, Mr. Sherrin.” Her voice flattened and then became artificially bright. “Good to hear your voice, too. When did you get in?”
She gave us a pained look and her free fingers pantomimed a ponderous male mouth opening and closing with pompous authority. After a couple of minutes in which her side of the conversation seemed limited to “Yes, I see, yes,” she put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, “One of the directors. He’s liable to talk another twenty minutes. Why don’t you two go on ahead and I’ll catch up with you at the shelter—yes, Mr. Sherrin, yes I do see, but—”
She tore a sheet off her scratch pad and drew us a rough map of where to go.
“We can take my car,” Heather McKenzie said. “It’s just over in the Holiday Inn parking lot.”
As we left, Dixie’s voice followed us down the now-deserted hall, “Yes… I see… yes…”
After nearly three hours of new-furniture smells, it felt good to get outside to a spring night in North Carolina. Despite dew-dampened streets, car exhausts, and occasional whiffs of fried food, there was an overarching sweet freshness to the April air. Cars and shuttle buses had melted away for the evening and now High Point’s Main Street was almost as traffic-free as I remembered.
Just as Dixie Babcock was probably ten years older than me—“Than I,” came Aunt Zell’s schoolteacher voice in my head—Heather McKenzie was probably ten years younger. She was also several inches shorter yet her stride matched mine as we crossed Main Street to the Holiday Inn, and she seemed to be enjoying the cool air, too. Her camel slacks and teal blue blazer looked expensive and fit her compact body stylishly but they weren’t exactly designed for April in North Carolina.
“Wasn’t that jacket hot today?”
“If it stays this warm, I’ll have to buy something cotton,” she admitted. “I wasn’t thinking clearly when I packed nothing but wool and corduroy.”
“This your first time in the South?”
“First time to really look around and enjoy.”
“Oh?”
“Actually, I was born in Georgia, but my parents took me North when I was only ten days old. It’s so different down here, isn’t it? Everything’s already in bloom. Up there, buds are barely starting to swell.”
Her car was a white Lexus and the passenger seat was littered with maps and folders and a couple of empty fast-food bags.
“Sorry about the mess,” Heather said. “Just throw all that stuff on the backseat.”
As I gathered up a handful, a glossy eight-by-ten sienna-toned photograph slid out of one folder. It showed three people in a workroom or studio. Sketches of furniture groupings covered the bulletin board behind the tilt-top drawing table. The central figure was a small, dark-haired woman, who’d half turned on her swivel stool and had one high-heeled foot extended as if she were about to stand. She wore black slacks, a short-sleeved black turtleneck, and what looked like an authentic Navajo squash blossom necklace of turquoise and silver.
She was laughing at the two men, who looked as if they could eat her with a spoon. The first was casually dressed and unfamil
iar to me, but the man in a sports jacket and tie was a much younger Jay Patterson, unmistakable with his broad face, square jaw and bulbous nose. It took me half a minute longer to realize that the small stylish woman in this photograph was the same chiffon-draped Matilda McNeill Jernigan that we were on our way to meet at a homeless shelter.
“Dear Lord above!” I exclaimed. “If this is what Savannah looked like when she left, no wonder people didn’t immediately recognize her tonight.”
Heather took the photograph and slid it back into the folder. “I just hope she’ll talk to me. You were with her tonight. What’s she like?”
“Nothing like the reactions I’ve heard from people who knew her. I thought she was someone’s eccentric mother or grandmother. She talked about the Market, but anyone who lives in High Point could probably tell you the same things she told me. Do you specialize in furniture people up there in Massachusetts?”
“Not really,” she answered vaguely.
We had turned off Main and were now driving east on Kivett Drive. Heather, who’d been in town long enough to get her bearings, pointed out various buildings: “The Hamilton Square showrooms are over there and Hamilton Wrenn’s here, and down that way’s a building shaped like the world’s largest bureau if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“I’m more interested in shopping than doing the tourist bit,” I told her.
“All the same, you really ought to go by the Discovery Center and see how a furniture factory works if you’ve never been inside one,” she said. “It’s amazing to see how they set the knives for cutting legs and spindles when a piece is in production.”
She turned left on North Centennial Street and soon pulled into the parking lot beside a red brick building. Open stairs mounted to the second floor and several men lounged there under the security light to smoke their cigarettes, a mix of black and white, drably dressed, an air of defeat on most of them. And even though I’d never seen them before, they were familiar to me. I’d probably see some of these very men in court next week.
Their eyes sized us up as we approached and when I said, “Yolanda Jackson? The Father’s Table?” a couple of them gestured to the short flight of steps that led down to a metal door beneath the stairs.
The basement was built of cement blocks. Beyond a small vestibule were double glass doors that led into a large and surprisingly cheerful dining area. Although the ceiling was low, there was nothing cavelike about the room. Its block walls had been painted off-white and someone had done fool-the-eye paintings which gave the illusion of looking out wide windows into a vaguely Biblical landscape of calm green hills. Painted geraniums bloomed on the “window ledges” and green vines seemed to twine along the top.
The fifteen or twenty bleached-oak tables had matching chairs stacked upon them and an elderly white man was mopping the floor.
He gave us a smile as we came in, but kept mopping. Instead, we were greeted by a small, energetic woman of late middle age with flashing brown eyes, beautiful olive skin and short black hair that had a heavy dusting of gray. Her smile was warm and welcoming but with a touch of regret. “I’m sorry, but we’ve finished serving for the evening. If you’re hungry though, I could give you some bananas and maybe a peanut butter sandwich.”
“We’re not here to eat,” I said. “We’re just looking for Yolanda Jackson.”
If possible, her smile became even warmer. “I’m Yolanda. How can I help you?”
I introduced myself and Heather, then said, “A woman asked us to meet her here tonight. She’s wearing a dress that looks as if it’s made out of chiffon scarves. A Matilda McNeill Jernigan or maybe Louisa May Fern—”
“Savannah,” the woman interrupted.
“You know her?” asked Heather, surprised.
“Sure. She’s been coming to us since the end of January.”
“No, I mean, do you know who she really was?”
“I know who she is,” said Yolanda firmly. “But I’ve lived in High Point long enough that if you’re asking if I know she used to be an important designer, yes, I know that, too.”
“Does she ever talk about it?” Heather asked eagerly.
The woman’s friendly smile faded.
“Why are you really here?” she asked us sharply. “What is Savannah to you?”
I explained about the mix-up in tote bags and Heather described the series of profiles she wanted to do on Market innovators.
“She may come. She may even bring back your bag. But talk about herself?” Yolanda Jackson gave a Latin shrug. “She doesn’t speak of her past life once. Not about the furniture part anyhow.”
“About other things?” asked Heather.
Yolanda gave her a slow, appraising look and her lively brown eyes narrowed. “That’s not for me to say. When people come here, I give them dignity and respect. What they tell me in confidence, I keep in confidence. And now I must leave you. You may wait until we lock up if you want to, but I have work to do.”
She crossed the room and disappeared into a corridor beyond the kitchen.
The old man finished mopping and courteously lifted down two chairs from a nearby table and set them on the damp floor for us.
I checked my watch. It was now nearly twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Savannah, almost twenty since we left Dixie, and no sign of either woman.
“Maybe there’s something in her bag that could tell us where she lives,” said Heather when another five minutes passed and conversation dwindled to nothingness.
I pulled the Fitch and Patterson brochures from the bag, then the packets of fried chicken and another of ribs. Beneath that was a mahogany doorstop carved in the shape of a frog sitting on a lily pad, a flashlight, several chiffon scarves, and a much-folded page torn from an issue of Furniture/Today. The date at the bottom was last December. One side carried a full-page story about a cooperative venture between a Chinese particle-board manufacturer and an American-based company. On the other side was a picture of Jay and Elizabeth Patterson with their daughter Drew and Dixie’s son-in-law Chan at a party somewhere.
A little black book with her own address circled in red would have been nice, but the bag held nothing that helpful.
As we sat there, an occasional man or woman, one with three young children, came in for bananas, and Heather watched each one with covert distaste.
“You know what must be the worst thing about being poor?” she said suddenly. “The clothes you have to wear. Old clothes are so—so gray. No bright clear colors.”
Beneath her own rich blue jacket, she wore a white silk shirt. A purple and red silk scarf was tucked into the open neckline. Her nails were short, but neatly manicured and painted a pink that matched her lipstick. Clearly color was important to her, but—“Believe me,” I said. “Drab, faded clothing is not the worst thing about being poor.”
“Savannah must feel the same way,” she said, ignoring my remark. “You have to admire her for that. Even if her mind’s a little scrambled right now, she hasn’t been defeated. She still finds a way to wear colors.”
“Which is odd, if you think about it,” I said idly. ‘1 heard that she never wore color before. Just black.”
We were abruptly joined at our end of the table by a belligerent man who hunched and mumbled over his banana as if afraid we were going to try to snatch it from him—another manifestation of the Law of Unintended Results.
Civil rights for the mentally handicapped and the main-streaming of psychotics back into the community are commendable goals, but when Reaganites emptied out our federally funded institutions, they sent federal patients home without compensatory federal funding. I’ve had a lot of these unfortunates in my court, and I’ve seen the despair of their families, who’ve been pushed to the end of their financial and emotional limits. When I say that I’ll ask to have a relative put on a waiting list, we both know that our county facilities can’t begin to service the number of seriously disturbed people who need help.
This man who g
uarded his banana from us probably wasn’t violent, but you can never be sure. I’d have felt more comfortable if I’d had my usual bailiff near at hand.
After thirty minutes, it seemed clear to me that Savannah wasn’t going to show. Heather would have waited longer but Yolanda Jackson was ready to lock up, so I gave her the tote bag and asked her to please hang on to my purse if Savannah should happen to bring it in. “And if Dixie Babcock comes looking for us, would you tell her I’ll be sitting on the sidewalk in front of her building if she’s not in her office?”
Yolanda looked at the man who’d been sharing our table. Where I saw latent paranoia, she seemed to see an ordinary human being who had no reason not to be helpful. “Hey, George? You gonna be sitting on the steps for a while? If this lady’s friend comes looking for her, tell her she’s gone back to the office building, okay?”
She gave his arm a squeeze.
“Yeah, okay,” he mumbled, and as we drove away, I looked back. He was sitting on the very top step, watching, and he gave me a thumbs-up gesture.
A few exhibitors were still straggling out of the GHFM building when Heather dropped me off a few minutes past ten. Inside the lobby, the guard gave me a dubious look as I passed, but I flashed my badge and kept going to the elevators.
Everything was silent on the sixth floor and the tap of my heels echoed loudly on the polished tile as I hurried past Vittorio E’s gold-and-ivory display and turned the corner past the motion furniture’s archway.
Dixie’s door was closed and the office looked dark. I could see a note taped to the door, but I didn’t go down the hall to read it because I suddenly noticed that Kelly Crisco had left one of those large dummies face down in the swing.
Except that he was clutching the cushions in a way no dummy could.
The cowboy boots looked familiar.
“Chan?”
He didn’t move and his breathing seemed shallow and irregular.
I touched a pulse point on his neck and the heartbeat was almost undetectable. An odor of alcohol, chocolate and sour vomit emanated from the cushion beneath his head, and he didn’t respond when I shook his shoulder.
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